Taken to School

What does it say about the state of the Democratic Party that the most sensible response on education from yesterday's debate at Iowa came from the former senator of Alaska, Michael Gravel? Toward the end of a debate on ABC, the candidates were asked their views on performance-based pay for teachers. Senator Dodd of Connecticut took the question first, and offered what has become the standard Democratic line on the issue. "I'm not in favor of necessarily giving more preference for a teacher that's performing somewhat better. Measuring that I think is the wrong direction we're going in," he said. "The idea of discriminating one group of teachers against another in that regard, I think is a huge mistake, and I'd oppose it."

Got that? Discriminating between teachers is a "huge mistake." But all discriminating between teachers means is recognizing differences in their performance. We do this for just about every other trade in the world: doctors, lawyers, salesmen, wait-staff, CEOs, stock brokers, middle managers, etc. Why, among all trades in the world, should teachers be exempt from being held accountable for — or, more importantly, rewarded for — their performance? Mr. Dodd, toeing the teachers-union line, seems to object to the idea that we'd even measure how well teachers perform. Forget about performance-based pay, apparently; we shouldn't even know who's performing and who's not. This is no way to handle the education of the next generation.

Senator Obama gives a somewhat better answer on this question. "I actually think that we can implement a performance-based system that teachers buy into," he said. "But I don't think it can be imposed on teachers." New York City's experience, in which teachers have resisted buying into a merit pay program that differentiates between teachers within the same school, suggests Mr. Obama may be right about the second part of his statement, but gives little confidence about the first part.

Mr. Obama went further than Senator Clinton, who instead of answering the question spoke about universal pre-kindergarten, which, if legislated, could be called the Government Babysitting and Teacher Full Employment Act. Governor Richardson repeated the cliché that low pay is the only thing holding back our government-monopoly school system.

Only Mr. Gravel said: "They're all talking business as usual ... We need competition in education." While Mr. Gravel didn't have time to elaborate, he's known to be a supporter of school vouchers. On the Democratic side, this is a fringe position; among the Republicans, the most vocal supporter of vouchers is the frontrunner, Mayor Giuliani, a good indication of which party would be more likely to enact real school reform.